Posts by druck

VDI comes to the Raspberry Pi

Silent Pi

I've been using the Pi2 to RDP in to work since it came out. Completely silent, unlike the HP i7 laptop, even after re-pasting its heat sink.

Samba man 'Tridge' accidentally helps to sink request for Oz voteware source code

First past the post

If the voting system is so complex you need software (open or closed source) in order to count it, it isn't for for purpose.

Whatever you say about first pas the post, everyone can understand the concept of who got the most votes wins.

Predictable: How AV flaw hit Microsoft's Windows defences

Re: The MS platform is pretty robust these days, but it only takes one bad Apple

Compared to Windows 95 undoubtedly the security of Microsoft products have got better. But compared to commercial UNIX's, BSD's and Linux, it's got at least twice as far again to go.

Electrician cuts wrong wire and downs 25,000 square foot data centre

Re: opps

To estimate the risk, you have to ask how many times have the engineers removed a UPS from a live data centre. If he answer is never or less than a couple of times in the last year, then the estimate is a 1:1 chance they'll cock up the procedure.

At least you got it back up in 36 hours, I'd have said a minimum of 48.

Libertarian hero: 'Satoshi Nakamoto', government funds, the NSA and the DHS

Re: NSA

Ah, I thought I thought of that myself, but I was obviously remembering your post.

NSA

I'm surprised that the conspiracy nut-cases haven't come out of the woodwork to claim that the bitcoin creator was working hand in hand with NSA, and they are able de-anonomize the blockchain or some such nonsense.

Who! would! want! Yahoo!? How! about! Verizon!?

Split?

Split the off the search no one uses from other bits no one wants - makes even less sense than buying AOL.

How business is taking the space race to new frontiers

Please stop regurgitating fluff pieces from The Conversation.

Putting New Shepard back on the pad after a little vertical hop is incomparable to landing back a Falcon 9 first stage which has helped put a payload in orbit.

British woman loses £1.6 million to romance scam love rats

Re: Damn.

It's no fun being an intelligent and honest person, when you see how much you could be making from the dumb suckers out there.

Australian cops rush to stop 2AM murder of … a spider

Strueth!

For the love of XXXX man up, throw a tinny at it, and let the croc in the back yard take care of it.

(Speaking as someone who's been all over Oz, and really bloody looked but not found anything more deadly than an echidna).

Russian nuke plant operator to build on-site data centre

Re: So?

Having worked for a short time many years ago as a CEGB test engineer in both a coal and nuclear power stations in the UK, I know which one I preferred.

The Magnox nuclear plant was extremely well managed, maintained, and spotless - from the generator hall to the reactor floor it looked like your mother dusted it regularly. The focus on safety from plant operations to health physics couldn't be more intense.

Then there was the coal fired station, you can't have solid floors anywhere because of the carcinogenic coal dust which got everywhere would collapse the buildings, so you could look down at your feet at the top of the cooling block right down through all the grid floors to the basement 300ft below - very disconcerting at 3am. When I finished a 36 hour shift testing the boiler tubes and went to the wash room, I spun around in surprise to see what looked like a coal miner in the mirror - it turned out it was me, I had never been that filthy in my life.

Microsoft rides to Dell's rescue, wrecks rogue root certificate

Re: Needed MS really.

Windows regularly deletes any unauthorised root certificates, to prevent malicious use. The fact that Dell used a DLL to put it's back in means they knew damn well what they were doing was wrong, so they can't have any complaint against Windows Defender wielding the ban hammer.

Plusnet ignores GCHQ, spits out plaintext passwords to customers

Re: TalkTalk customer Schadenfreude...

Paul Moore wrote:

To be fair, Plusnet's overall approach to security is one of the best in the industry.

I'm afraid it isn't, despite at least 7 years of complaining by customers their POP3 and SMTP mail severs still only support plain text login.

So if you check your email from a mobile device...

Intel hires Qualcomm's compute leader to lead new mobile push

x86 Baggage

Intel should have hired him to work over their X-Scale cores (and god did it need it with the worst instructions per clock of any ARM design), as he can't work miracles and somehow make Intel's chips competitive with ARM while carrying all the baggage of the x86 ISA along with them.

£2.3m ZANO nano-drone crowdfunded project crashes and burns

Good luck with seeing any of your cash again

The last time I was unfortunate enough to deal with a liquidator, they spent 2 years sending me great thick wads of literature through the post, explaining the substantial costs they running up (a fair proportion from posting great big wads of literature). At the end of I got next to f'all back, what a surprise.

Apple's design 'drives up support costs, makes gadgets harder to use'

Re: But

If you look at the apps for a 3 year old, they are brightly coloured, have big obvious buttons and lots of visual and audio feedback. They straightforward and intuitive for all ages, and a damn sight better than the grey on grey adult orientated apps.

Re: Good points

Paul Crawford wrote:

I often wondered why the GUI muppets at Gnome, Firefox, Google, MS, etc, all seem to go down the same route of removing functionality and discoverability.

It seems only those working on Mint Mate/Cinnamon still have their heads screwed on and are interested in designing a usable GUI, rather than a bloody fashion statement.

Red dwarf superflares batter formerly 'habitable' exoplanet

Colonisation

In July, NASA declared it had discovered "the closest thing yet to another Earth" - Kepler-452b. Once again, scientists put the kibosh on the prospect of colonisation by noting that the Kepler-452 solar system's extreme age - six billion years - meant the planet is probably suffering as its venerable G-type star increases its energy output en route to expanding into a red giant.

It's far more likely any inhabitants of Kepler-452b would be looking to colonise a small blue planet around a fairly young main sequence star, than the other way around.

MPs to assess tech feasibility of requirements under draft surveillance laws

What I don't really understand is why they feel the need to record the communication records of everyone.

It's the same as saying CCTV camera's should not record everyone and only the criminals. A very small amount of the CCTV usage is following suspects using live cameras, the vast bulk of the usage is trawling through records after a crime has been committed. So as with communication records, you need to record everything in order to be able to trace back from a person of interest to their associates, many of whom would not be known in advance.

Terrorists seek to commit deadly 'cyber attacks' in UK, says Chancellor Osborne

If your goldfish got together with a few (thousand) others and made it in to the wrong part of the secondary heat exchangers, it could well shut down the station!

Economics and poltics rather than terror

As the article said, an AK-47 on the street is far more effective an instrument of terror than a hack. The on-line infra structure is at far greater threat from state sponsored economic espionage, as we've seen with gigabytes of material from US defence contractors slipping off to somewhere behind the great firewall, and also many cases of massive disruption of systems of any country which has dared to oppose Vlad's bouts of adventurism.

Today's Quiz Question: Are there more SIMs than people in the world?

Picocell

Why doesn't someone come up with a 2G picocell for these old devices, which will then relay over 3G or better.

We are not getting out of PCs, says Fujitsu exec

Better than HP

Glad Fujitsu is not dumping the PC biz just yet, the father-in-law bought a very nice i7 laptop recently, solidly built, quick and quiet. Much better than the P.o.S i7 HP he donated to me, although after a full stripping down, cleaning out the heat exchanger and putting new thermal paste on chips, it now runs at a sensible temperature rather then frying and dying at over 100C any time you try to do anything remotely taxing.

Hubble finds lonely 'void galaxy' floating in cosmic nothingness

Re: A bit confused here...

I assume they mean we would not have powerful enough telescopes until the 60's to be able to see any other galaxies.

Conficker is back – and it's infecting police body cams

Re: @ Mark85

A business can maximise shareholder value by either:-

a) cutting every corner, producing a crap product, look for a new sucker to buy each time

or

b) spending slightly more on the product, getting steady stream of repeat business from satisfied customers

While there are plenty of (a)s, there are quite a few (b)s too.

Doctor Who: Nigel Farage-alike bogey beast terrorises in darkly comic Sleep No More

Re: I have to say I think it was the weakest of the series so far

I did fall asleep half way through (or sooner) but that's more to do with having a 2 year old and a 1 month old than the episode. Just got them off to bed and sat down to watch, and we are away too - a machine that compresses a whole months sleep in to 5 minutes, it's called the TV.

I was hoping the article would have a proper spoiler so I'd find out what happened, but instead we'll have to play the DVR game - "Did you see this bit?", "I think I fell asleep before then", "Lets watch from here", "Bugger, I fell asleep again", "Me too".

Yahoo! spills! user! account! beans! in! 60%! of! gov! data! requests!

As many as...

...7,817 people still use Yahoo! ? I'll get me coat.

The Edward Snowden guide to practical privacy

Re: Facebook

You might have 2 SIM cards, but do you have one or two IMEIs? Even if its two, are they easily related? - Same manufacturer, same location.

Brits rattle tin for custom LCD Raspberry Pi funbox

Re: Landfill Android

I was also thinking that a landfill android would have a lot better screen and touch capabilities, but not to use it instead of a Raspberry Pi, but in additional to one. An app on the phone handles the GUI, the Pi handles and I/O, and you get the fun of developing comms between them.

Net neutrality protestors bundled out of UN conference

Free or not free

The Internet.org service – developed and led by Facebook – allows customers of certain mobile networks to access a number of services while having to pay for the data that they use. Those services include Wikipedia, BBC News, Facebook, and a range of local news and sports results providers.

I thought the idea was the data for those services were free, and anything else had to be paid for - hence the outrage.

ARM reveals the Internet of Things security defenses hackers will inevitably learn to evade

Re: TrustZone user-tweakable boards?

A Linaro 96Board should be suitable. You can always play around with the TrustZone in Qemu first.

NHS IT must spend a fortune to save a fortune, says McKinsey

NO!

The government is putting another much needed $8bn in to the NHS this parliament, it better as hell not all get wasted on IT projects, which have almost a perfect record of complete failure.

What the Investigatory Powers Bill will mean for your internet use

Re: Google doesn't know what I've accessed

PlusNet doesn't support any encryption for POP3 or IMAP either.

Untamed pledge() aims to improve OpenBSD security

Narrowing

I assume pledge only allows narrowing of permissions? Or there would be nothing to stop a compromised program from issuing pledge again to widen them.

Einstein's brain to be picked by satellites

Re: Wait. What the ....

albaleo wrote:

Science that can't be easily verified: We'll test this theory a bit, and if the results look dodgy, we'll adjust the data, tweak the models, and call anyone who doubts us a denier. After all, we know we're right.

That's why climate change is a religion, not a science.

ProtonMail DDoS wipeout: Day 6. Yes, we're still under attack

Re: It's time to update SMTP to make end to end encryption default

Where is the robust key management infrastructure to support it going to come from? The magic spaghetti tree?

GSMA offers a share and share alike approach to the C-Band

Re: Mobile is the problem

By not having a cell tower using that frequency within 15+X km. Phones will only transmit on frequencies paired to a tower they can pick up.

Linus Torvalds targeted by honeytraps, claims Eric S. Raymond

All I can say...

...is luckily I married a tech journalist at I met at a tech conference, before I could get myself in to trouble. She wont let me go to such things alone any more!

GCHQ's CESG team's crypto proposal isn't dumb, it's malicious... and I didn't notice

Re: Genuinely puzzled

A particularly virulent infection stemming from the Home Office's Sir Humpherys.

Europe's Asteroid prang probe plan calls for cubesats

Re: Answer

Well they aren't rubbish (while they're still working), but an increasing number of small satellites certainly isn't going to make things any easier to manage up there.

Web server secured? Good, now let's talk about e-mail

Name and shame

PlusNet only support AUTH-PLAIN, and that's after almost a decade of users begging them to offer a secure way of downloading email when romaing.

WoW! Want to beat Microsoft's Windows security defenses? Poke some 32-bit software

Re: Damned if you do, damned if you don't

But I've never been unable to ssh in to the linux machine and kill the rogue process.

Verisign warns new dot-word domains could make internet unstable

Why now?

Why are these companies/people only complaining about this now? Everyone with an once of common sense was decrying the ICANN money grab from the first day the dots words fiasco was announced.

Ruin your co-developers' life with Mimic, the Unicode substitution tool

Re: A variation

This is nothing new, a program for the Acorn Archimedes Pre-RISC OS Arthur operating system was written in BASIC, but protected itself from being reverse engineered by replacing every variable and function name with the string "ClaresMicroSupplies", or rather a subtly different combination of letter cases for each instance. It did make it completely impossible to follow, as you just can't tell the difference based on case alone.

O2 joins Virgin Media as member of weak crypto software club

Re: A pedant writes:

How about not using a sig at all, there's enough to scroll through on comment pages without having extra crap on each message.

Another go with MIPS IoT: Imagination unveils new Creator board

Re: Not an easy sell @tojb

tobj wrote:

My R-Pi (OK I only have the first one) is painfully slow when I run full-fat linux on it with a proper sized TV screen.

Try a Pi2, its far faster than the Pi1 vs Pi2s specs would suggest, and a mid weight desktop such as Mate is eminently usable.

Microsoft now awfully pushy with Windows 10 on Win 7, 8 PCs – Reg readers hit back

I blew chunks when I read that!

Internet daddy Vint Cerf blasts FCC's plan to ban Wi-Fi router code mods

Re: VHS vs Wifi

Not even with the most advanced software defined radio will you be able to interfere with VHF air band frequencies from hardware designed for 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wifi.

Devs ask Microsoft for real .NET universal apps: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android

Re: "The C# language has been a big success for Microsoft"

What is this C-Pound nonsense? # is a hash, pound is £. If anything call it C-Hash.

I think it is quite a nice toy language for small projects, just a shame its still mainly Microsoft only. There is mono, but it comes with a fair share of problems.

Ring Chime: Needy wireless doorbell or $30 bling t'ing?

Re: Signs can be beneficial...

Yodel have thrown a set of glass kitchen pans over a 6ft locked gate, put a parcel inside the recycling bin on collection day, and left a book in a cardboard packaging outside the back door during thunderstorm. All items were destroyed, so if a company uses Yodel, I don't use them.